A group of young boys huddled on Second Avenue in the East Village on Sunday, talking about Ukraine.

“I like the wilderness,” said Andrew Lys, 10. “The wilderness and the farms.”

His 8-year-old brother, Matthew, said he liked Kiev. “It’s a little bit like New York. There’s tall buildings, smoke.”

Every weekend, the Lys brothers attend a youth group with about 50 other children at the Ukrainian American Youth Association, just down the street from Veselka, the well-loved 24-hour pierogi and potato pancake palace at Second Avenue and Ninth Street.

Around Thanksgiving, the group started following the political crisis growing in their parents’ homeland. Most of the children had been traveling to Ukraine since they were toddlers. All had relatives who joined the protests — a cousin, an aunt or an uncle.

But their connection to the revolution was forged largely through video streaming live from the front line of the protests, Independence Square, known as Maidan, and through social media — allowing them to participate in the events as their parents and grandparents never could have at their age.

“We’ve been in touch with people over Facebook and Instagram,” said the head of the youth group, Dania Lawro, 48. “So, for example, if something was happening on Maidan, and they said, ‘We need medical supplies right away,’ the kids would see how they could get medical supplies, and we have organizations there that could pass them along.”

On Saturday, a day after Ukraine’s president, Viktor F. Yanukovych, fled Kiev, handing a hard-won victory to the revolution, the children at the youth association printed out photos of antigovernment protesters killed in clashes last week. They went outside and created a memorial, taping the slain protesters’ photos on a wall of the building.

“We helped print out and build this for the people who gave their lives,” explained Maxim Medytsky, 11, who wore a traditional embroidered Ukrainian shirt with tassels underneath his parka.

Ms. Lawro said she had encouraged parents not to hide from their children the drama unfolding in Kiev.

“It’s so important for us to share this with them,” she said. “We show them videos, we take them to demonstrations. We want them to know they are part of a bigger community, and that they can do all that because they live in a free country.”

The children’s memorial became the backdrop for a news conference on Sunday at which Representative Carolyn B. Maloney and the American-born chief rabbi of Kiev, Yaakov Dov Bliech, among other community leaders, called for continued support for the people of Ukraine.

After it ended, Representative Maloney bent down toward the Lys brothers, who were wearing down jackets that matched the shade of blue on the Ukrainian flag, and asked whether they had helped build the memorial for the demonstrators who had died.

The boys were tongue-tied. But they looked proud.

Then they were pulled into a line for a photograph.

Correction:April 9, 2014

An article on Feb. 23 about the fall of President Viktor F. Yanukovych of Ukraine and his flight from the capital, Kiev, misstated the day of his departure. He left the evening of Friday, Feb. 21, not Saturday, Feb. 22. The same error appeared in an articles on Feb. 24 and Feb. 26. (The error was discovered this week by an editor.)

A version of this article appears in print on , Section A, Page 15 of the New York edition with the headline: In Manhattan, Children of Ukrainians Connect to Revolution. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe